After around two years of anticipation, Valve's Steam Controller hit the market last November alongside a wave of Steam Machines. Now, around 7 months later, the company has announced that 500,000 of the gamepads have been snapped up.

In a blog post, Steam engineer Jeff Bellinghausen said that, thanks to the controller's popularity, developers are now spending more time to program games to work well with the Steam controller out of the box, citing examples of Dark Souls III and DOOM.

After more than three years in development, version 3.0 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available. LWJGL is an open-source Java library for helping game developers but can also be used by other application developers for accessing other functionality that otherwise isn't offered by the Java API.

Oh baby! Brigador is one game you cannot afford to miss out on. It has such beautiful design and destruction that I can't help but fall in love with it.

In Brigador you are tasked with piloting some form of advanced weapons platform, like a mech unit or a tank and stomping over lots and lots of beautiful environments. All buildings and units on each map can be destroyed and the lighting is really impressive.

According to a recent update on Steam, the sequel to Daedalic Entertainment's award-winning debut game is now available for Linux. The inclusion of a Linux version comes as part of a big update including an engine upgrade and several game tweaks.

I haven't played this game yet, as I've been holding out for a Linux release, so it's great to see Daedalic continue to add Linux support to their back catalogue of popular adventure games. Currently there's no SteamOS icon on the Store page, but the game runs without issues for me.

Hopefully the first game will get a Linux version soon too, as it has been developed with Java and LWJGL, but I was having some issues with getting it to run natively on Linux when I tried to do so before Christmas last year.

Developed by Sundae Factory, Ecotone is a platform game with an evolving gameplay which allows brainwork and/or skill phases. The game's primary focus is to invite the gamer into a new kind of world, and features a unique, dreamlike and mysterious atmosphere. In the strange Ecotone's world, you will embody a weird little character lacking a real identity. As this character passes each level, he will earn some new skills. But beware, the environment is full of strange creatures and monsters, and some of them may be dangerous.

Another problem is that the mainstream gaming press has almost never been fond of the idea anyway, and the amount of articles out looking down it probably wouldn't have helped things. Ars hasn't exactly been kind about it at all in previous articles. Hell, even certain Linux websites like to use sensationalist article titles talking down Linux popularity on Steam. When actually, it's doing pretty well all things considered.

Steam Link is Valve's game streaming solution where when paired with a controller makes for easy gaming from a living room TV. The Steam Link is Linux-based and it does support game streaming from Steam running on SteamOS or any Linux distribution.

The key thing to remember is Steam overall is always growing, so a lower overall percentage of Linux users doesn't necessarily mean there are less Linux users on Steam (it could actually be more, but dwarfed by also having even more Windows users on Steam).

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You can make it appear by simply having different hardware or a different operating system. It seems to detect when you change things, as if it knows it needs to check on you again. This is by design of course, as the entire point of it is to show what people are currently using, so if you've changed something it wants to know about it and send it along. This is one reason why people keep saying they see it when they boot into Windows after not using it for a while, of course you will, that's a change in your setup. This is another reason why I dislike it, as that can create an unintentional bias in the results. This bias isn't against Linux though, as it would work the same the opposite way around of course. This is why I feel the results were actually a lot higher for Linux initially, as it did a survey for a big bunch of Windows/Mac users trying it and submitting it on Linux before moving back to Windows/Mac.

A good bit of reading was a recent editorial titled "A different approach to calculating the popularity of Linux gaming on Steam" which will help put your mind at ease.

Today, June 1, 2016, Epic Games has had the enormous pleasure of announcing the release of Unreal Engine 4.12, a massive update it the 4.x stable series of the cross-platform and highly acclaimed game engine.

Unreal Engine 4.12 comes exactly two months after the release of Unreal Engine 4.11, bringing hundreds of updates, countless bug fixes across all platforms, a multitude of new features, and the initial implementation of some brand-new technologies, such as the Vulkan Mobile Renderer.

Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer of open-source painting software Krita has announced the release of version 3.0.

3.0 is a major version bump and with this release the project now has its own repository and wiki. The main focus of the developers for this release was code cleaning. With this release Krita has been ported to the latest Qt 5 and KDE Framework 5, thus keeping the codebase modern.

The GNOME Calendar app is getting a lot of attention lately, especially now that it has been integrated by default into the Ubuntu Linux operating system, but also because the development cycle of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment is ongoing.

We reported a few days ago that the second snapshot, version 3.21.2, of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release later this year, on September 21, 2016, was released to public beta testers and early adopters, bringing various improvements to its core applications and components.

Feral Interactive have updated their teaser radar to show that Life Is Strange is coming to Linux/SteamOS and Mac. The only official announcement for now is Mac App Store, but it is now confirmed to be coming to Linux. We already sort of knew this thanks to SteamDB info

Tumbleweed Express, trains mixed with guns in the wild west now on Steam with Linux support
Posted by liamdawe, 1 June 2016 at 12:03 pm UTC / 548 views
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Tumbleweed Express looks like quite a cool action game where you're defending a train from airships and other trains with Borderlands styled graphics.

A nice addition to the on-rails shooter type of game where you don't control your movement, anyone going to check it out? It's pretty darn cheap too, so that's great.

RetroArch has announced their first release of the Mednafen/Beetle PSX HW PlayStation emulator for Linux and other operating systems.

The Mednafen PSX HW core is significant in that its added an OpenGL renderer utilizing an OpenGL 3.3 core context. This PlayStation emulator now supports rendering on the GPU and is said to be one of the first doing so for PSX that is based upon modern OpenGL. This GPU renderer is based upon the work done by Rustation, a Rust-written PlayStation emulator.

Normally, when we talk about any issue involving how realistic video games are becoming as an art form, those stories revolve around either the decrying of realistic violence within the games or occasionally governments attempting to use realistic game footage to pimp their own fictional military capabilities. But, while those stories often come off as silly, those examples and their like are not the only benchmarks for just how realistic gaming is becoming. Other examples involve games reaching a realism level high enough to open the door to real-life application.

Serving as a recent example of this is the latest from racing game giant Gran Turismo, which has achieved enough realism to earn it a partnership with Formula One Racing as a sort of proving ground for racers to get their license with the professional racing organization.

The team behind Wine Staging, a special version of the Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator) software that lets Linux users play Windows games and use Windows apps on their PCs, has released Wine Staging 1.9.11.

It’s time to meet Manjaro Linux Gaming, an Arch Linux-based operating system that’s designed for gaming. This Linux distro comes with many open source software and emulators to assist you in gaming. The overall settings of the OS have been adjusted to suit the needs of gamers.

More in Tux Machines

Linux: To recurse or not

Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

today's leftovers

MX Linux Review of MX-17. MX-17 is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It’s XFCE based, lightning fast, comes with both 32 and 64-bit CPU support…and the tools. Oh man, the tools available in this distro are both reminders of Mepis past and current tech found in modern distros.

Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
The Vulkan Layer Factory aims to creating Vulkan layers easier by taking care of a lot of the boilerplate code for dealing with the initialization, etc. This framework also provides for "interceptor objects" for overriding functions pre/post API calls for Vulkan entry points of interest.